World's First International Standard for Multicore Fiber Released at 2026 Global Optical Fiber and Cable Conference

On October 19, 2026, the world's first international standard for multicore fiber was officially released at the 2026 Global Optical Fiber and Cable Conference in Wuhan. The standard was jointly drafted by FiberHome, Hengtong Optic-Electric, ZTT, Yongding, Far East Communication, and Shanghai University.

The standard specifies technical conditions for multicore fiber geometry, transmission characteristics, mechanical and environmental performance. It provides a common benchmark for domestic manufacturers in product design and production inspection, and also serves as a basis for engineering procurement, construction, and maintenance in submarine cable and AI data center projects. Chen Wei, deputy director of the APC Technical Committee, said the standard will promote weak-coupling multicore fiber from laboratory trials to large-scale commercial use, offering fiber-level standard support for AI-era computing network infrastructure.

As AI large-model training and massive agent interconnection drive surging traffic, conventional single-core fiber capacity expansion is approaching physical limits. Multicore fiber, which increases capacity through spatial multiplexing, has achieved a standardization breakthrough. Liu Yunjie, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said at the conference that society-wide computing demand is expected to rise by a factor of 100,000 in the coming decade, making network architecture transformation urgent.